Profound Grief and Profound Joy Can Co-Exist

I have been silent for almost three weeks as I have been deeply immersed in a personal soul journey through Japan and Bali. There is so much I want to share in the coming weeks, but today I simply want to honor grief, in all the ways each of us experiences it. No loss is the same for any one soul.

During this time, I revisited one of my deepest truths: even while experiencing the most profound grief, we may still experience immense joy. Both can be true.

Based on my own experience, and that of so many I have witnessed, there is no fixing or solving grief. It simply does not work that way. And there is no ONE single way through it.

We each must find our own way to discover the Beauty through the Pain, a chapter in my upcoming book, Live and Die Awake.

There is a profound polarity between pain and joy. We can carry deep pain and still remain open to life. We can grieve and still laugh. We can ache for what has been lost and still feel gratitude for what remains. Joy does not erase grief, and grief does not make joy any less real.